News is getting out fast about the momentum of A-players joining the software drive at Brocade. It started last year, notably with Dave Meyers joining the CTO office, and recently Tom Nadeau and Benson Schliesser came aboard. I’m still surprised Robert Bays (CTO of Vyatta) has stayed in the shadows given his far-reaching influence on the industry; his name won’t stay in the background for long.

There are others on the move at Brocade as well, not all of which is public yet. One piece is that the board of the OpenDaylight Project selected our own Matt Wolpin to lead the marketing efforts for this important community project.

Advancing new software-centric network technologies requires a special breed of people willing to challenge traditional, static thinking. And, did you notice? Those people are increasingly realizing that Brocade is the place where they can exercise their valuable skills.

The 21st century battlefield is an intricately connected space, relying on cutting edge technologies to deliver real-time information to the warfighter. Today’s warfighters need to be in constant communication with squad members and support staff. In many cases, virtual communications between command centers underpin situational awareness and can mean the difference between life and death.

Sometimes people confuse openness with open source, so let me explain — openness is about very broad compatibility and customer choice; open-source is about a disruptive software development and licensing model.

Government agencies are still in dire need of modernizing their entire IT infrastructure, and the key to initiating this transformation is the IT network. I've said it before, and I’ll say it again, modernization of the IT networks can help save Federal agencies more than $5 billion over the next 5 years. In a time when federal spending is increasing daily, who wouldn't support saving a couple billion dollars?

A survey on the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) by MeriTalk, reported that, while 86% of Federal IT professionals polled have completed data center consolidation plans, the majority of IT professionals give their agencies a “C” or below in grading their consolidation efforts. What are the challenges they’re facing?

It seems strange to those of us who work in the networking industry, and have had the benefit of so many customer insights and experiences, that in a world where commercial viability equals reliable connectivity, some people still don’t seem to understand why the network matters.

While at Interop Las Vegas 2011 I had the opportunity to speak on two featured panels at the Carrier Cloud Forum, a Light Reading and Heavy Reading hosted event. Light Reading chief editor, Carol Wilson, moderated my second panel which focused on two important aspects of cloud: performance and security.

While many interesting perspectives were discussed and debated, there was a noticeable stir in the crowd when I brought up a new practice we created named Service Creation.

At no time has information technology (IT) modernization and its role in protecting our nation been more important than it is today. The defense IT community has a full plate—from mandated efforts to consolidate

At no time has information technology (IT) modernization and its role in protecting our nation been more important than it is today. The defense IT community has a full plate—from mandated efforts to consolidate data centers by migrating to the cloud by 2015, to improving IT security, to responding to the growing pressures and implications of mobility (not to mention sequestration, budget cuts and political pressures everywhere). The modernization of government IT systems needs to happen quickly.

What often stalls IT innovation has very little to do with technology and a lot to do with leadership. As government leaders need to increase productivity, functionality and return on investment from their IT networks, it is important to look at technology as an enabler of leadership and transformational change. Common challenges include:

Understanding how to invest in IT tools, systems and infrastructure with declining budgets

Managing the increasing cost of current IT infrastructure

Dealing with the high rate of IT systems that miss original intent or service level agreements

And, of course, responding to increasing security threats

The Defense Department spends more than $40 billion annually on IT, more than $250 billion in the last seven years or so. That’s a quarter of a trillion dollars—a lot of money. Modernizing IT systems and infrastructure, like most change or transformational agendas, comes down to leadership. There is an opportunity right now for a more aggressive leadership platform as it relates to the modernization of IT by the Defense Department, especially around the network.

This blog post originally appeared on SIGNAL magazine. Read the rest of the post here.

Just as DNA represents the magical building blocks of life, fabrics have become the magical foundation for enterprise data centers, both for today and into the future.

Gartner, as published in their recent Magic Quadrant for Data Center Network Infrastructure report, states that “requirements for data center networking equipment have evolved rapidly, with emerging technologies increasingly focused on supporting more automation and simplified operations within a virtualized data center…. The data center network market has been transformed with new architectures, new technologies and vendors specifically targeting solutions to address the changing size and density of the data center, shifts in traffic patterns, and the increasing requirement to simplify network operations.”1

The direction is clear. A decisive shift to fabric-based architectures has been realized and data centers will be better off as a result.

Since our founding, data center fabrics have been Brocade’s DNA and are the lifeblood behind our vision for the On Demand Data Center. In fabrics, we have led industry innovation for both Ethernet and Fibre Channel.

Our vision for the On Demand Data Center is characterized by the ability to flexibly deploy data center capacity – compute, networking, storage and other services - in real-time, whenever and wherever you need it.

Our goal is to deliver:

New levels of network automation that enable network capacity to be deployed far more quickly than with legacy networking technologies

Dramatic improvements in network efficiency, utilization and performance to ensure networks are performing optimally today, and with the headroom to massively grow network capacity over time, without having to rip-and-replace infrastructure

The agility to deploy network services in both virtual and physical form factors, and to leverage network virtualization and programmatic control to influence network behavior in ways never before possible.

Empowerment of these properties across all types of data centers - private, public or hybrid.

Brocade was recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant report for its DNA for data center Ethernet fabrics. We believe our placement high in the Visionaries quadrant confirms the innovation and value we have delivered to nearly 1,000 customers over the past two years with our VDX family of switches. Our solutions are empowering a new generation of on-demand data centers by delivering the world’s most automated, efficient and agile networks.”

Of equal importance behind Brocade’s DNA for data center fabrics is for storage. As you may know, Brocade has led the Fibre Channel SAN market for the last 10+ years. Our technology powers the majority of global 1000 data centers, including both enterprises and service providers, and our customers consistently achieve “six 9s” of availability, which is less than one minute per year of downtime.

Contrary to some industry pundits, Fibre Channel continues to grow within enterprise data centers. In our last quarter, Brocade SAN products and services grew 3% year-over-year and 6% sequentially to a record $416 million. Of the total, our Gen 5 (16 Gbps) Fibre Channel products represent more than 40 percent of director and switch revenues.

Looking ahead, the DNA established for our Ethernet and Fibre Channel fabric networks will continue to drive innovation for several initiatives, including network virtualization, service-oriented fabrics, dynamic service insertion, multi-tenancy, cloud orchestration and interoperability. All of these are designed to support our customers’ efforts to reduce ongoing operational data center costs by simplifying architectures, eliminating complexity and reducing the number of components and layers wherever possible.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Many of you may have heard the 1980s hit "Video Killed the Radio Star" by Woolley & the Camera Club, but did you know that cloud killed the CIO? Well, according to recent research it has… not literally, but cloud is fundamentally changing the role of the CIO in enterprises.

As businesses embrace cloud services, is the CIO needed? IT infrastructure isn’t being bought, so why does the CIO exist? Or, will cloud procurement and management practices drive the CIO to change their role in order to survive? These are some of the questions we asked 100 CIOs across EMEA, and we found that the role of the CIO will remain pivotal over the next decade as cloud adoption grows, but will evolve exponentially.

To access applications, information and communications systems, the network is not just another ‘device’ in the same way as a tablet, laptop or smartphone – it is the enabler of all business communications, activities and transactions. If that network is not managed and developed appropriately, the consequences can be significant and financially damaging and as cloud is embraced by more businesses, asset management becomes even more important. The role of the CIO in ensuring access to applications and services will become increasingly operationally critical, strategic and central to an organization’s growth. In short, no more will CIOs be solely responsible for ‘kit’, but they will become more consultative and strategically important to the business.

If you are a CIO reading this, where do you see yourself in this evolutionary journey? Do you see yourself as a ‘kit’ person, or are you the strategic thinker? Grab a coffee and take a look at our infographic below and see what kind of CIO you are (click the image to see the animation)…

Whichever role you play, you need to ensure your network is ready for the next wave of innovation. Check out this video to understand whether you are ready to embrace the future. If you are not, you know where to find me....

At Brocade, we work hard to beat the expectations of customers and deliver excellence in everything we do. Possibly nowhere is that more true than in our Federal team. To do better than average, be successful, and to help others be successful―especially given the recent upheavals and challenges the US has faced, has often been a challenge. So it’s great when we receive a rare but welcome opportunity to be recognized outside the company.

In late January, our own Anthony Robbins, who joined the Brocade team in August 2011, was selected as one of the 2013 Federal 100. This is no small feat, but given his contributions to the company and our customers in the public sector during this short time, it’s not too surprising.

Did you know that the Federal IT market is an $80 billion opportunity? Of this, networking and related spending occupies an eighth, or more than $10 billion/year, according to Gartner.

"The Federal 100 Awards recognize government and industry leaders who have played pivotal roles in the federal government IT community—individuals who have gone above and beyond their daily responsibilities and have made a difference in the way technology has transformed their agency or accelerated their agency’s mission."

It’s certainly nice to be nominated, but it’s even nicer to know your efforts have been recognized, that you’ve made a difference. Please join me in congratulating Anthony, and also in recognizing the Federal team for the great success they have had over the last several quarters.

We’ve earned the right to sit at the Federal “top table”, we recognize the honor, and we’re ready to grasp the opportunity and continue to help customers face the future.

Government agencies designed their IT networks 20 years ago and implemented them 10 years ago. Now they need to be modernized or the networks will suffer consequences to their mission critical goals. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, or chat with Anthony Robbins (@AKRobbins2010) and Brocade (@BRCDComm) about #SDN, #virtualization and #OpenStandards on Twitter.

Vyatta is built on the fact that software-based networking is a critical component in network virtualization, and that software networking will actually transform those same networks into innovation platforms. The Federal government is one of the top target verticals for Vyatta and Brocade’s SDN strategy because it aligns so well with the current IT mandates that most federal agencies need to adhere to.

In its predictions for the top ten trends CIOs need to plan for in 2012, Gartner* described the cloud as “a disruptive force [which] has the potential for broad long-term impact in most industries.”

London-based cloud managed service provider, Oncore IT, is a testament to this trend. In order to meet the demands of more than 100 customers, Oncore IT turned to Brocade for a data centre networking solution based on Brocade® Ethernet fabrics and VCS® Fabric technology. This new solution is designedto guarantee performance and service availability, while delivering a flexible “pay-per-port” pricing model for customers.

But don’t let me tell you about. Instead, watch the video below and listen to what the customer has to say about Brocade Ethernet fabrics. If you like what you hear, give Brocade a call and we can help you transform your network in the same way Oncore IT has.

Software defined networking is a disruptive technology that is creating an opportunity for Brocade to gain ground in important customer segments such as large enterprises, service providers, data center hosting providers, and cloud computing

Software defined networking is a disruptive technology that is creating an opportunity for Brocade to gain ground in important customer segments such as large enterprises, service providers, data center hosting providers, and cloud computing providers. Brocade has been pursuing this opportunity with an aggressive R&D roadmap that has already resulted in a number of innovation breakthroughs. For example, we were the first networking company to introduce support for OpenFlow technology at 100 Gigabit Ethernet performance and true “hybrid mode” support for OpenFlow that enables our customers to run this SDN technology concurrently over their production IP networks.

Today we announced yet another exciting advancement in our investment in SDN innovation. We’ve reached a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Vyatta. Vyatta is the pioneer in virtual routing, security and VPN in the software networking segment. Their products and technologies enable customers to build agile, capacity-on-demand networks that can scale up dynamically as data center requirements increase.

With this innovation, network elements such as a router or firewall can become another virtualized resource, which can be orchestrated and deployed like any other data center resource, leveraging the economies of the x86 infrastructure. Vyatta creates the networking and security services that are required between separate pools of compute and storage – whether the pools were created by traditional network virtualization methods like VLANs or by newer methods like SDN.

Brocade and Vyatta also share a common vision in delivering open architectures and solutions. Vyatta’s core technology is hypervisor-agnostic and enables the company to partner with a rich ecosystem of companies including every major server, server virtualization, data center orchestration/ management companies. Both Vyatta and Brocade support a broad range of hypervisors including VMware, Microsoft HyperV, KVM and XEN; along with RESTful APIs and OpenStack support for automation of cloud deployments.

One of the most exciting things about this announcement is that Brocade is already the leader in Ethernet fabrics, which serve as the foundation for the cloud and simplify the physical infrastructure of the network. Brocade’s Ethernet fabric technologies combined with Vyatta’s software networking solutions offer the ideal platform to empower SDN deployments where flexibility, mobility and rapid deployment are paramount requirements.

By combining the assets from this acquisition with our own internal development and our broad strategic partnerships, we believe our strategy is going to be a strong competitive differentiator as the world of hardware and software continues to blur. The move to software networking enables Brocade to move up the value stack to our customers and partners and allows us to utilize both hardware and software development to become truly an end-to-end networking company. Today networking just got a lot more exciting, and Brocade again is at the forefront of innovation.

I am very excited to announce that Brocade has been chosen as a Founding Partner and the Official Network Solution Provider for the new San Francisco 49ers football stadium located just down the road from our headquarters in San Jose. The ne

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